Context is everything. When Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on 1 June, 1967, nothing like it had been heard or seen before. In hindsight, what came to be termed ‘rock’ probably began with earlier albums such as Highway 61 Revisited, Pet Sounds, The Doors, Fresh Cream, The Velvet Underground & Nico, even Revolver. But there’s little disagreement that for the two-and-a-half million people who ran out and bought a copy of Sgt. Pepper… in the summer of 1967, it was the sonic detonation that blew a giant hole through the That world of mono pop. Its effect was immediate, widespread and experienced as a major event. Of its first broadcast on radio, Roger Waters never forgets “pulling the car over into a lay-by, and we sat and listened… in this old beat-up Zephyr, just completely stunned.”
Having taken 400 hours of studio time over 129 days, it was certainly a recordbreaking production intended to shock and awe. And because Abbey Road’s fourtrack equipment necessitated constant mixdowns to a second machine to free up tracks, Ringo found himself hanging around for so many lost hours, that it was Sgt. Pepper… who taught him how to play chess. It’s a fitting symbol of how this milestone project transformed The Beatles from giddy young men into thoughtful, middle-aged individuals.
POP ART
Pepper… also has arguably the most iconic record sleeve in history – it was designed by Sir Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, and photographed by Michael Cooper, with input from The Beatles
To this day, Sgt. Pepper… remains the most common number-one choice of greatest albums of all time, a status unlikely to be challenged in our lives. Its legacy as a monument of British pop was formalised on its 20th anniversary, when the BBC and PBS aired It Was 20 Years Ago Today, the first landmark documentary about its making. With John Lennon dead and old wounds still sensitive, its estranged survivors stuck to the facts of the actual studio work, largely overlooking the background personal stories which, I think, better explain why such an intense energy was brewing in the first place. For we credit this record to The Beatles, but there’s a reason why Ringo was playing so much chess in the canteen, and why there’s so little of George Harrison’s guitar. And this particular story – the somewhat embarrassing one about credits, money, drugs, egos and revisionism – has taken a long time to fully emerge.
To see this album the right way around, the first thing to remove is Paul McCartney’s whole ‘Sgt. Pepper’ concept. The album’s highest points, A Day In The Life, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!, came from a nameless winter between December 1966 and February 1967. This was when they also produced Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane – which didn’t appear on the final album. Strawberry Fields Forever was the sketch that inspired the whole series.
Like most masterpieces, this album grew from a dark and confused place. Throughout the second half of 1966, John Lennon had slid into a full-blown depression that he hid even from his wife. His worsening drug habit can’t have been helping, but it had been a rotten summer for The Beatles – their existential crisis following four Fab-ulous years in which they clocked up seven albums, 12 US No. 1s, two films and about 800 live performances. According to Cynthia Lennon, John had spent the whole jangly period between Help! and Revolver staying up all night smoking dope and listening to Bob Dylan. But in May 1966, shortly after the completion of Revolver, legend has it that Dylan played a freshly pressed copy of Blonde On Blonde in Lennon’s living room. Dylan presented 4th Time Around, which Lennon rightly understood as a cruel skit not just of Norwegian Wood, but of himself. The sensitive Beatle never got over being laughed at by his idol.
HERE, THERE AND ANYWHERE
Then, on tour in America, Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” comment provoked a storm of Christian outrage and vinyl bonfires. Sick of touring, sick of America, sick of screaming girls, sick of themselves, all four Beatles took a long-overdue sabbatical in the autumn of 1966. George Harrison went to India and John Lennon disappeared to southern Spain for the filming of How I Won The War. It was in this lost period that lines such as “It’s getting hard to be someone” began forming around images of an old park in Liverpool. Crippling self doubt had reawakened John Lennon’s haunted childhood – his motherless, fatherless and largely loveless beginnings. Further compounding his isolation, Lennon was living out in Weybridge, Surrey. Bored in his marriage and a dysfunctional father to three-year-old Julian, he began hanging around the house, self-medicating his depression with uppers, downers and outer-spacers.
They were all feeling the hangover. Brian Epstein was battling his own pill addiction and had seemingly become so convinced Beatlemania had crashed, he merged his management agency with the operation of Robert Stigwood, the manager behind the Bee Gees and Cream. Epstein hadn’t told The Beatles yet, but he’d at least managed to renegotiate their embarrassing record deal with EMI. For the next round of recordings, The Beatles were set to get 10 per cent of wholesale price.
When The Beatles convened at Abbey Road in late 1966, a BBC film crew captured their burntout state. “I’ve just been sitting around… getting fat”, confessed the candid Ringo. George angrily pushed through their microphones, while John looked 10 years older. In those sessions – their first in nine months – they recorded a series of, by their own loff y standards, rather shabby jams. However, George Martin orchestrated, time-shified and reassembled two difierent experiments into Strawberry Fields Forever, a veritable eureka moment for everyone – particularly its chief architects, Lennon and Martin.
Although Penny Lane has since been immortalised in Beatles memory as its natural twin, McCartney was actually recording When I’m Sixty-Four while Strawberry Fields was gestating. That’s how far apart the two songwriters had grown. “We couldn’t relate to [Paul and Ringo] anymore”, admitted George Harrison years later. “Not just on the one level – we couldn’t relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much… I had such an overwhelming feeling of wellbeing, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours.” Ringo agreed to try, but by the filming of the video for Strawberry Fields Forever, Paul still hadn’t experienced an LSD trip. He was also the only unmarried Beatle still living in London – in fact, just around the corner from Abbey Road.
The intense public pressure for a Beatles comeback is why Strawberry Fields Forever and Penny Lane were rushed out in February as a double A-side 7”, by which stage, work had already started on A Day In The Life. The warmly received single succeeded in raising morale, but of course, both tracks couldn’t appear on the future album. George Martin long regretted they hadn’t resisted the EMI managers, but it’s debatable whether the producer had any real executive power at that point.